NSW Police are investigating damage to a mobile phone tower in the Hunter, believed to be the cause of Wednesday's Optus outage that potentially cut Hunter residents off from Triple-0.

It was understood the outage was linked in a police report of suspected vandalism and copper theft as the telco's technician's worked to restore coverage to its 5G+ and 5G networks in some 15 Hunter postcodes around Port Stephens and Maitland.

In a brief statement, Optus said its customers' ability to contact Triple-0 "may be impacted", and apologised.

Welfare checks for customers whose calls to emergency services may not have connected were ordered about 4pm, as the provider customers "may be able" to contact emergency services via Wi-Fi.

Optus has contacted for comment.

In a statement, Police said the

See Full Page